Imperfect Paradise: The Castle Part 1

Antonia Cereijido  00:00

[theme music in] Hey, I'm Antonia Cereijido, the host of Imperfect Paradise from LAist Studios, the show about hidden worlds and messy realities. This week on Imperfect Paradise, the first of our four part series: The Castle. The Magic Castle is a club for magicians. It sits on a little hill above Hollywood looking like it's straight up out of a fairy tale. The thing that makes the castle so special is that you can't just show up. You have to be invited. I've driven past it many times, wondering who's in there? What's going on behind the stained glass windows? What's it like to be inside of this members only club? This story pulls back the curtain to a world that many describe as stuck in time and gives you a front row seat to what happened in 2020, when the Castle, like so many institutions, had to confront its problematic past.

Carly Usdin  01:02

It felt like you were back in time in a place where like, almost everyone there is an older, white, cis, heterosexual man. It's their world that you're stepping into.

Angela Sanchez  01:11

The magician is a guy in a tux and a woman on stage is the individual who gets sawed in half, split apart, and lit on fire.

Kayla Drescher  01:21

And he was like, A little lady doesn't do any magic. And then when I started my show, he just left.

Paul Draper  01:27

It took 10 months of us meeting before we were able to make any sort of public statement.

Carly Usdin  01:34

I was propelled by my own pettiness, my own stubbornness and my hours and hours of preparation. So I was like, here we go.

Antonia Cereijido  01:45

Here's LAist Senior Producer, Natalie Chudnovsky. [music out]

Natalie Chudnovsky  01:53

I want you to meet Carly.

Carly Usdin  01:55

Carly Usdin. Pronouns are they/them. I'm a filmmaker and an amateur magic enthusiast. [laughs]

Natalie Chudnovsky  01:55

Oh, cool. You still identify as a magic enthusiast?

Carly Usdin  02:05

[pauses] Yes, [Natalie: Mm.] because I find, I mean, for lack of a better term, I do find it to be incredibly magical.

Natalie Chudnovsky  02:16

[piano music] As you can hear, I'm a little surprised, because Carly hasn't done any magic in about six years. But that's where this all ends. It starts in Carly's childhood.

Carly Usdin  02:31

I grew up watching like David Copperfield specials on TV. And I thought that was the coolest thing a person could aspire to was being a magician who had a special on television.

David Copperfield Special  02:41

[audio clip] The Statue of Liberty, standing 305 feet high, and I was going to make her disappear... [music out]

Carly Usdin  02:49

Um, whenever my parents like hit the garage door button to lower or raise the garage door, I would stand next to it with my arm out like Magneto in the X-Men like I was like, lifting or lowering it. And I knew that I was not controlling it, but it just felt fun. I don't know.

Natalie Chudnovsky  03:02

It feels powerful in that moment.

Carly Usdin  03:04

It feels powerful, and I think probably many kids feel powerless. But I think especially the kid that I was, getting teased at school for being smart and being queer and being Jewish, and not even knowing I was queer yet, and just like wanting out of that so badly.

Natalie Chudnovsky  03:24

[piano music in] Carly did get out. They left their small town in central New Jersey, became a filmmaker, turned 30, got married. And then [music out] they moved to a new city, LA, where they quickly got obsessed with one particular building.

Hype News Clips  03:43

[audio clips] The Magic Castle is an exclusive club run by the Academy of Magical Arts where only their members and guests are allowed in... Founded in 1963, the Magic Castle looms over Hollywood... The Magic Castle in Hollywood bills itself as the most unusual private club in the world... [music out]

Natalie Chudnovsky  04:05

You already were aware of the Castle?

Carly Usdin  04:07

Yeah, I was aware of it like pop culturally. I knew it was really old. You couldn't just walk in. You like, you had to be a guest or an invitation or something like that. I wanted to go hang out with magicians. I wanted to watch magic. I wanted access to the space.

Natalie Chudnovsky  04:21

[music in] If you've been in LA long enough, you've probably also heard of the Magic Castle. It has the same draw as a speakeasy because to get in you have to know someone who knows someone who's a magician. And for the magicians I talked to for this story, being a member is a stamp of legitimacy.

Natalie Chudnovsky  04:42

Why is the Magic Castle a big deal?

Paul Draper  04:44

Why is the Magic Castle a big deal? There isn't a PhD in magician. So when I'm auditioning for a television show, when I speak to a event planner in California, the first question I'm asked is, Have you ever performed at the Magic Castle?

Angela Sanchez  05:05

Just to even have the ability to walk into the doors of the Magic Castle is a mark of one's ability to gain access into an exclusive magic space.

Kayla Drescher  05:12

You have all these magicians that have performed here. You have all this history. There's a library of all these books with secrets. The guy who made the Statue of Liberty disappear for David Copperfield- He's just sitting at the bar. All the people, all the tricks, all the stories, it all just exists in one place.

Paul Draper  05:34

It's this castle on the hill where magical things happen in the magical world of Hollywood, where celebrities go, and people dress up. And you can only go if you have an invitation. [music out]

Carly Usdin  05:54

So I started doing research into the Magic Castle, and I found the Magic Castle website, and it said, We offer adult magic classes. And the kicker is that while you're enrolled in lessons, you basically have a temporary membership to the Castle.

Natalie Chudnovsky  06:11

Carly had found a sort of back door to the Castle, signing up for a class, which meant they temporarily have access to this private club. And Carly was aware that they were not the kind of person you'd typically see in the world of magic. And actually, that's what made them excited about it.

Carly Usdin  06:29

If you say magician, you get a very specific image in your head. It's probably an older cis white heterosexual man, because that has long been the archetype of the magician in American popular culture. And at the time, before I came out as trans, I was identifying as a woman, my gender assigned at birth. So I was like, I'm gonna be this like, younger woman person that goes in there. I'm like in my early 30s. I'm queer. I'm like, they're not gonna know what to do with me. [music in] So there was also this part of like, I'm gonna get in there, you know, because it's a space that's clearly not meant for me.

Natalie Chudnovsky  07:06

This story on Imperfect Paradise is about Carly falling in love with the Magic Castle. And what happened when that love was confronted with the reality of an exclusive private club. It's about the years leading up to 2020. And how that pivotal year [George Floyd protest ambi: "No justice, no peace."] brought internal reckonings to so many institutions...

Spectrum News Clip  07:34

[audio clip] We spoke with 12 people who have some fairly detailed and significant allegations against the Magic Castle...

Natalie Chudnovsky  07:41

...including the Magic Castle. It's about what it's like to face your own responsibility.

Carly Usdin  07:49

I had good intentions, at least 50% good intentions, and then I think 50% chaotic screaming.

Natalie Chudnovsky  07:57

And whether staying to fight for change is worth it. We're gonna tell the story of this inflection point through Carly and the people they crossed paths with. In many ways, it's an ordinary story, but set in an extraordinary place. This is part one of Imperfect Paradise: The Castle. I'm Natalie Chudnovsky. [music out]

Natalie Chudnovsky  08:44

This is Imperfect Paradise. I'm Natalie Chudnovsky.

Natalie Chudnovsky  08:48

So Carly signs up for the beginner's magic class at the Magic Castle in 2014.

Natalie Chudnovsky  08:54

Wait, what does the magic class reminder email say?

Carly Usdin  08:57

Reminder. Your basic magic class- rude, uh, basic- begins next Tuesday, September 2nd at 7:45 PM. Remember the dress code? Because of course the Magic Castle has a very intense dress code. All materials will be supplied. Try to come a little early so we can get organized. I look forward to seeing you at the Magic Castle.

Natalie Chudnovsky  09:16

The night before, how were you feeling?

Carly Usdin  09:19

The most excited a person could feel. Classes are [car ambi] in the evenings during the week, so it's right in the middle of rush hour. I definitely left a lot of extra time to get there early because of traffic and just general anxiety and excitement.

Natalie Chudnovsky  09:34

The Magic Castle is just a few blocks over from the tourist center of Hollywood, the Walk of Fame, and the theater where they host the Oscars. It looks like a Victorian mansion from a Disney movie- stained glass windows and turrets. It was built as a private home around 1909. And then in 1963 when it got its liquor license, it became what it is now, a private clubhouse for magicians.

Carly Usdin  10:01

[footsteps] When you walk into the Castle, there's like a reception area. There's no like, door you can enter. And then I, I saw that there was a bookshelf with this little owl statue on it. And the people that were working there at the front told me that you have to say the magic word in order for the owl to grant you admittance to the Castle, which I was so deeply charmed by. But you had to guess what the magic word was.

Natalie Chudnovsky  10:30

It's "Open sesame."

Carly Usdin  10:33

[door opening] And then the door opens. [music in] Just that moment alone, I was like giddy. [indistinguishable conversation] Basically, you're in a parlor looking bar area, and there's like, a big old timey fireplace. It is Victorian dark, moody, velvet, patterned wallpapers and so much old art and old artifacts of magic. And there's also Irma, the piano. She's a ghost who plays piano. The color palette is like reds and golds and purples. All the wood is old dark wood. It feels like exactly this thing that's just sort of like plucked out of time. It's a lot of stairs and a lot of turning, and then there's this little classroom tucked away in the back. [music out]

Natalie Chudnovsky  11:36

What was that first class like?

Carly Usdin  11:38

It felt like being back in school. We went over the rules of being a magician. Some of the primary ones being: You don't do the same illusion for the same audience more than once. Obviously, you do not reveal your secrets. We started with card tricks. How do you handle a deck of cards? Different ways of shuffling, different grips like, physically how your hand holds the, the packet of cards. And the thing I was super delighted by is that I kind of picked it up quickly. Once I started doing classes, I would come home and like, my wife would be like, What'd you learn? And I'd be like, give me 10 minutes. I would go in the other room, familiarize myself again. I'd come out and be like, here's a new trick I learned.

Natalie Chudnovsky  12:17

For Carly, learning had been a fraught thing, because they have obsessive compulsive disorder. OCD. In high school, Carly says they had a tough time focusing because of it. But learning magic was a different story.

Carly Usdin  12:32

An interesting thing that happened once I started taking classes is that when I was present, and learning and doing these tricks that I wasn't experiencing my OCD symptoms. And I never experienced that like in school growing up. In high school, my- was when I realized I had OCD and it was like spinning wildly out of control because I wasn't seeing the doctor. I wasn't medicating, like anything. And so it was such a different experience of learning where I'm so present, it's just this kind of like, perfect blend of mental and physical working in harmony, where you have to be paying attention on both levels really closely.

Natalie Chudnovsky  13:16

Have you ever found something else that quiets your OCD in the same way as magic does?

Carly Usdin  13:24

No, I haven't.

Natalie Chudnovsky  13:27

Carly kind of fell in love. They didn't want to become a professional, but they were constantly thinking about magic, constantly practicing.

Carly Usdin  13:36

I was just carrying a deck of cards with me everywhere. I would go to work and I'm just like shuffling absentmindedly. I remember one night I was out at a bar with a bunch of friends. And we got a little drunk, and one of my friends was like, Show us a trick! And I vividly remember, I mean, viv- vivid is not the right word because I was a little drunk, but I remember, atmospherically I remember, um, doing a card trick for my friends and their friends and when I did the trick everyone screamed, and I wanted to just like, bottle that feeling. I wanted to like take that feeling and give it to everybody.

Natalie Chudnovsky  14:15

Can you describe that feeling?

Carly Usdin  14:18

Delight? Actually doing a close up trick for someone and having them be like, Ah! at the end of it? Like I'd have to imagine that if you like, robbed a bank and then you got away with it, you would be like, Oh my God, we pulled it off! Like that rush, [ ] pride, too. Like I'm learning a thing. I'm learning this art.

Natalie Chudnovsky  14:36

[music in] After the beginner course ended, Carly took Magic 2, and then 3 and 4, learning coins and more complicated tricks. After class Carly would catch magic shows at the Castle and many of the members and performers matched Carly's early assumptions.

Carly Usdin  15:00

It felt like you were back in time in a place where like, almost everyone there is an older white cis heterosexual man. It's their world that you're stepping into.

Natalie Chudnovsky  15:10

The Castle says it doesn't keep data on the racial backgrounds of its members. And they couldn't give me historical data on gender either. But one magician's unofficial estimate from 2019 put Castle membership at 12% female. And that's the estimate I've seen of women working as magicians in the US. [music out]

Angela Sanchez  15:33

If you asked anyone to draw you a doodle of what a magician looks like, they will still probably draw you a white guy in a tux.

Natalie Chudnovsky  15:41

That's Angela Sanchez, a Castle member and magic historian. I called her up to talk about some of the history behind the gender disparity in magic and she framed the conversation through the lens of power. Because to have magical abilities means having power, knowing or being able to do something that someone else can't.

Angela Sanchez  16:03

Because of this power dynamic for a woman to be the person wielding magic that reverses the power imbalance that a patriarchal society has already set where a man is in power.

Natalie Chudnovsky  16:18

And women with supernatural powers? There's a word for that. Witches.

Angela Sanchez  16:24

And so this notion that a witch, a woman who holds power, is adverse to what a woman should and ought to be, is something that cues you in to how women in magic are generally treated in Western European societies.

Natalie Chudnovsky  16:43

At the same time as women were being burned at the stake for witchcraft, there were people who earned money on the street doing performance magic. Fast forwarding to the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe and the US, performance magic moved from street entertainment into Broadway theaters and the parlor rooms of upper classes. On stage magicians would often be assisted by young boys. During the Golden Age of Magic in the late 1800s, there were some famous female magicians, notably Adelaide Herrmann. And you would also see female assistants who would levitate or vanish. But in the 20th century, magic cemented a new role for women- being in peril. When an illusionist named P.T. Selbit unveiled a trick that some historians would say, added an element of intentional misogyny to the stage, a trick that would become iconic.

Teller  17:42

[audio clip] Eventually, every act in Las Vegas, Nevada does some version of this trick, sawing a woman into halves.

Angela Sanchez  17:50

It's one that audiences recognize everywhere. It is sawing a woman in half. A magician who engineered illusions, P.T. Selbit specifically asked for women to be the first ones to participate in this illusion. This was very much a situation that would go forward in branding magic with very clear gender roles of the magician is a guy in a tux and a woman on stage is the individual who gets sawed in half, split apart, and lit on fire.

Natalie Chudnovsky  18:24

[music in] So Carly was seeing the echoes of that history at the Magic Castle in the way magicians talked about women or interacted with their assistants on stage. But Carley also saw things that gave them hope that the Castle was making strides towards progress. For example, their magic class.

Carly Usdin  18:46

I remember being very pleasantly surprised that it was not a bunch of old, straight white dudes. It was actually a fairly diverse class. It was, I think, almost 50% female. It was a fairly diverse group of people racially, which was great.

Natalie Chudnovsky  19:02

And there was a women's group co-founded by the historian you just heard from, Angela Sanchez.

Carly Usdin  19:08

And I was like, that would be cool to have like a queer one. Like I don't know, maybe there's, maybe there's something there.

Natalie Chudnovsky  19:14

Carly liked their classmates, liked getting drinks after class and workshopping tricks and hanging out in this immersive, magical space that was so unlike anywhere else.

Carly Usdin  19:26

I really felt like I was a part of something. I'm part of like a cool club. And to the outside world, this is the dorkiest club to be in. But for me, I have not been this happy in a long time. [laughs] You know? So yeah, I did four classes in the span of like a year. And then I was like, I would like to become a member.

Natalie Chudnovsky  19:50

Carly wanted to be a part of the club for real. After the break, Carly auditions for a Castle membership. You're listening to Imperfect Paradise. [music out]

Natalie Chudnovsky  20:08

Hey, this is Imperfect Paradise. I'm Natalie Chudnovsky. After a year of taking magic classes, Carly decides they want to become a member of the Magic Castle. As a member, they'd get to watch performances, have access to special spaces like the library, and most importantly, get to hang out at the Castle whenever they wanted, and bring their friends.

Carly Usdin  20:32

The process to become a member is not simple. There's an application. There's like a whole essay. Why do you want to be member? What are you gonna bring to the Castle? When I wrote those essays on the application, I was like, Well, you know, as a QUEER person, I think I would bring something DIFFERENT. But the crux of it all, the biggest part of it is that you have to perform several magic tricks for a panel of magicians, which is terrifying to somebody who had only been learning this for a year.

Natalie Chudnovsky  21:05

Carly had heard nightmare stories about people bombing auditions, about how hard it was to impress the panel. They picked out four tricks to perform: the Chicago opener, mixing, restored napkin, and color changing knives. And they started practicing.

Carly Usdin  21:23

[music in] I was trying to fit in as much rehearsal time as I could. Every friend I knew, I was like, Can I do magic tricks for you and you'll watch me do them? I was like doing it over like FaceTime for friends that didn't live in LA just because I needed more people to practice in front of and if you recall, you can't do the same tricks for the same audience. It was also-

Natalie Chudnovsky  21:44

So you need a lot of friends.

Carly Usdin  21:44

I needed a lot of people that I could show it to at different stages of my preparedness, you know?

Natalie Chudnovsky  21:52

After months of practice, it was finally time for the audition.

Carly Usdin  21:56

I was full of fear and dread driving there. You know, the same route I always take but it felt different that night.

Natalie Chudnovsky  22:03

Carly remembers about six people trying out. All of them hanging out at the bar, getting called downstairs, one by one. Until finally, it was Carly's turn. [music out]

Carly Usdin  22:18

And I went in and there was like, I want to say four or five magicians in there. I don't believe any of them were familiar to me, but they were all cis men. It was an incredibly intimidating room. They do a little interview, and then they're like, Alright, show us, show us your tricks. So I started with the Chicago opener. [Carly speaks under voice over: Take these cards out of the box, and I'll shuffle 'em...] But you know, the thing with close up magic, especially, is that it's all about your hands, and the thing with anxiety is that my hands were shaking. I felt like I fumbled stuff and it wasn't as clean as it could have been. And also like, these are like pros, like these are guys who have seen everything. They are not a warm audience. They are just sort of like sitting back in their chairs, watching, and then you finish the trick and they just sort of nod, like there's no applau-, nothing. So like it is terrifying.

Natalie Chudnovsky  23:13

Is that a good nod? Is that a bad nod?

Carly Usdin  23:14

You don't know! There's no way of knowing. And so in my head I was like, that was a bad nod. That was a bad nod. At some point they were like, Okay, great. Thank you so much. [music in] And I was like, it's over. I was like, Oh, that did not go well. I do not think that went well. I think I was too nervous and I like fumbled it and I probably needed to practice more. I just really felt in my bones that I blew it.

Natalie Chudnovsky  23:37

Carly went back upstairs back to the bar.

Carly Usdin  23:40

I thought I would just leave when I was done and like an owl would fly to my house with like a letter, but they were like, no everyone just stick around. And then they came and got us and so we had to go back to the room downstairs, the six of us. Just go down to this, go down these stairs to this basement room in this like, you know, tiny theater, [music out] and they're like, Congratulations, all six of you made it. And I wanted to cry, I just like, cuz I was holding so much in my body like the, the anxiety of it. I was just like, Oh God!

Natalie Chudnovsky  24:19

[music in] Carly was officially a member. They were on the inside of this private exclusive prestigious magicians' club. And for Carly, this Castle membership was like being handed a golden key because members can invite any guests they want. It meant Carly could open up the Castle to their friends, people who didn't necessarily look like the typical magic show goer.

Carly Usdin  24:47

So I just wanted to change that, and not in a way that I was like, [music out] I'm going to change the face of the commun- No. I had no misgivings of like, I'm gonna do some huge thing. It was very on a, on a very small scale of like, I just want to bring my friends. And then from there who knows? If I can start a group for queer magicians, that would be really cool.

Natalie Chudnovsky  25:12

Did you think the Castle would be receptive? At that point in time?

Carly Usdin  25:22

I really didn't know.

Antonia Cereijido  25:24

[music in] That's a LAist Senior Producer, Natalie Chudnovsky. Next time on Imperfect Paradise, Carly enters the Magic Castle as a "full-fledged member" and starts experiencing the less magical aspects of the club.

Carly Usdin  25:46

It's like women have to be elegant and men are business, like it's just very like, magician and magician's assistant.

Kayla Drescher  25:48

Magic is still this microcosm of the world, but of the world in like the 50s and 60s.

Georgia  26:02

Is there a problem with people being uncomfortable and hit upon in the club? Um, there may be. I don't experience it myself.

Brandon Martinez  26:12

I would make jokes about the Chung Ling Soo stuff, like oh yeah, by the way, that's a white dude, and it's, it's racist, like, you know. So Castle, What are you gonna do?

News Clip  26:18

[audio clip] For decades, LA's iconic Magic Castle has been a private clubhouse for the Academy of Magical Arts, but some now say the beloved venue may not be quite what it appears to be.

Antonia Cereijido  26:37

That's coming up on Imperfect Paradise: The Castle. Listen to new episodes of the podcast every Wednesday, or tune in on Sunday nights at 7 PM on LAist 89.3 or LAist.com. [music out]

Antonia Cereijido  27:07

[theme music in] The voices you heard in the opening montage of the show belong to Paul Draper, Angela Sanchez and Kayla Drescher. By the way, I want to disclose that Carly has done some freelance videography for LAist Studios, though not for Imperfect Paradise. Imperfect Paradise: The Castle is reported, written, produced and sound designed by LAist Senior Producer, Natalie Chudnovsky. I'm the show's host, Antonia Cereijido. Catherine Mailhouse is the Executive Producer of the show and our Director of Content Development. Shana Naomi Krochmal is our Vice President of Podcasts. Additional production by Marina Peña. Jens Campbell is our Production Coordinator. Editing by Audrey Quinn. Fact checking by Caitlin Antonios. Our theme was composed by E. Scott Kelly, who is also our engineer. Imperfect Paradise is a production of LAist Studios. This podcast is powered by listeners like you. Support the show by donating now at LAist.com/join. This podcast is supported by Gordon and Dona Crawford, who believe quality journalism makes Los Angeles a better place to live. [music out]